updated Wednesday, May 7, 2014 - 6:44pm

Or, failing that, they hope to spin it as a fantasy of right-wing nut jobs.

But facts are stubborn things.

They’re hard to erase. And you never know when they’ll catch up to you.

Like recently.

“A newly released email shows that White House officials sought to shape the way Susan E. Rice, then the ambassador to the United Nations, discussed the Middle East chaos that was the context for the attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012,” one major news organization reported.

Nope. That’s not a report from Fox News.

It’s from The New York Times.

The Times reported that an email dated Sept. 14, 2012, from Benjamin J. Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, was sent to Ms. Rice ahead of her controversial appearances on several Sunday morning news talk shows three days after the attacks that resulted in the slaying of four Americans, including J. Christopher Stevens, the ambassador to Libya.

The subject of the email was: “PREP CALL with Susan.”

The president’s lieutenant gave directions to Ms. Rice on how to discuss the tensions boiling over in parts of the Middle East.

Especially pertinent are two goals:

— “To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.”

— “To reinforce the President and Administration’s strength and steadiness in dealing with difficult challenges.”

That the White House would issue such orders — to Ms. Rice and others on Obama’s team — is no huge shock.

The president was running for re-election; a big part of his platform was that America was winning the war on terrorism. So it was in his political interest to play up the possibility that a third-rate video sparked the violence that left four Americans murdered.

What is surprising is that these directions were typed and emailed. That made them subject to being ferreted out, thanks to one of the best tools available to uncover facts in our democracy — the Freedom of Information Act.

Governments can run from what they do. But thanks to this splendid, nonpartisan measure, they can’t hide.

The conservative group Judicial Watch used it to dig up this smoking gun on Benghazi. It shows that political considerations played a role in how the Obama administration, including then-Secretary of State Clinton, laid out the facts to the American public.

Not surprisingly, White House press secretary Jay Carney, in a heated briefing, dismissed the email as irrelevant.

Thus the spin continues.

Meanwhile, three family members of victims of the Sept. 11, 2012, attack have written to House Speaker John Boehner, demanding that a select committee be established to probe the attack. ...

Given the latest revelation — which even the Times couldn’t ignore — it’s time to stop the obfuscation and begin to root out everything.

Americans can be trusted with the truth, even if some politicians can’t.